Early Life
Cooper was born in Belgium to parents who were killed at Auschwitz concentration camp shortly after her birth. After spending years in various orphanages in Belgium, she was adopted by the Cooper family at age 6 and came to the United States. At age 8, she became an American citizen.
She began her freelance writing career in 1968, after completing a master's degree in psychology. As a result of her earlier study of comparative religion at Harvard University for a summer, she became interested in religious cults and began studying Scientology/Dianetics in 1968 in order to write about it.
Read more about this topic: Paulette Cooper
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Children became an obsessive theme in Victorian culture at the same time that they were being exploited as never before. As the horrors of life multiplied for some children, the image of childhood was increasingly exalted. Children became the last symbols of purity in a world which was seen as increasingly ugly.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)